Kansas State Librarian Argues Consortium Owns Content from OverDrive

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by Fbone

Kansas State Library's Overdrive collection only has 2452 titles. Currently 700 of them are available. I believe it is safe to say they had considerably less than 270,000 ebooks borrowed last year.

The article said:

Stasiewski noted that the company's overall national checkout number for 2011 was rapidly approaching the total checkouts for 2010. "We are at one checkout per second, which is something we haven't seen before.

How is that possible with only 700 titles available? Or is it that for just one library of the 330?

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

The article said:

How is that possible with only 700 titles available? Or is it that for just one library of the 330?

But how many copies of each title do they have?

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by SameOldStory

2006 Population of the state of Kansas = 2,764,000
One half of one percent of the population reading ebooks = 13,820
A 10% increase in usage = 1,382 more people ereading.

So as Kali pointed out, it would be 138,200, but that isn't what the 7 times the initial money is for. For 2012 they are only requesting 25k. That's only 2.3 times more for 2012 compared to 2006 for a 10 times increase in usage up to this point. When the contract would come into effect, it would be even more. As they probably expect a content increase, and a user increase in the next 3 years, they don't want to be stuck with a constant fee again.

[Fbone]

My guess is she is counting the audiobooks, music CDs, and videos which total about 9000 titles. Also there is the always available public domain titles to consider. Currently about 4500 of these non-ebooks are available.

Added: If any library doesn't add content, then Overdrive usage may not increase and may even decrease as patrons exhaust their wishlists. For Overdrive to assume such large increases they may be using incorrect data. There is a finite usage number.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

But how many copies of each title do they have?

Well, if the total number of titles 2452, and we assume that people are only borrowing the books for one day, and they do that for only 8 hours per day, you would get on average just less than 2 copies per title. If people are borrowing the books with an average of one week that would mean 14 copies of each book. But since people tend to keep the books for the entire lending period, and don't borrow books only during business hours, it would have to be more copies than that.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by Fbone

My guess is she is counting the audiobooks, music CDs, and videos which total about 9000 titles. Also there is the always available public domain titles to consider. Currently about 4500 of these non-ebooks are available.

I don't know, how many books can be licensed with this:

The state library's contract with OverDrive allows the 330 public libraries in the state to gain access to the state-run consortial platform (academic and school libraries can also participate). From 2006 through June 2010 (end of the fiscal year), the consortium's members paid OverDrive $568,000 in content licensing fees, with $182,000 coming from the state and the balance from the consortium members. If a member licenses access to a title it becomes available to all members.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

It's impossible to tell what the old contract stipulated without seeing it.

The old contract is shown at the bottom of the second article linked in the OP. The part about what OD is supposed to do is at the end, in the first annex.

[Harmon]

Originally Posted by SameOldStory

It would be great if all the lawyers commenting would say whether or not they are commenting in a general way, of if they know the fine details. I know it would help me to understand the situation better.

At any rate, it can be fun to speculate.

Not gonna happen. It would certainly be useful to know if a particular lawyer has experience in copyright, but not many of us are going to spend our time getting to know the fine details unless you are willing to spend some money to pay us for doing it.

I once spent 2 or 3 hours reading, analyzing & posting on a case here. Someone owes me a few hundred dollars! Actually, I did it for my own pleasure, but it was in the line of educating myself on something that interested me, and did not require me to delve very deeply into the law - mainly because the judge did a fine job in writing her opinion.

Mostly, you are going to get "curbstone opinions." They will be broadly correct, but they will not be as good as paid for advice.

[SameOldStory]

Originally Posted by Harmon

...

I once spent 2 or 3 hours reading, analyzing & posting on a case here. Someone owes me a few hundred dollars! Actually, I did it for my own pleasure, but it was in the line of educating myself on something that interested me, and did not require me to delve very deeply into the law - mainly because the judge did a fine job in writing her opinion.

Better you than me, Harmon. The very thought of doing that would drive me crazy, if I weren't there already.